Food deserts: We need more grocery stores in the right places

We need more grocery stores in Houston. And we need them in the right places.

HOUSTON CHRONICLE |
February 18, 2011

Houston doesn't have nearly enough grocery stores: That's the startling, stark conclusion of The Food Trust's new report "Food for Every Child." And without those stores, our neighborhoods and our health are suffering.

Consider the statistics. In the United States as a whole, there's one supermarket for every 8,600 people. But in the Houston area, that ratio is one store to 12,000 people. To bring ourselves up to the national average, we'd have to add 185 stores.

Obviously, some parts of Houston need those supermarkets far more than others. Grocery stores tend to cluster in high-income areas. Other neighborhoods are what the researchers call "food deserts": grocery-sparse barrens ruled by fast food and convenience stores — places where it's easier to buy beer than milk and hard to find an unfried potato. Chips and soda? No problem. Fresh greens, broccoli or grapefruit? Dream on.

The researchers crunched loads of numbers and created a half dozen maps, but basically, all the data show the same thing: In the report's words, "These lower-income areas with insufficient access to supermarkets are heavily concentrated on the eastern side of the city, east of I-45 on the north side; and east of Highway 288 on the south side."

The health results are what you'd expect: When it's hard to buy healthy food, people are more likely to eat the unhealthy stuff. Neighborhoods without a supermarket suffer disproportionately high rates of obesity, heart disease and other health problems, while people who live close to grocery stores are more likely to maintain healthy weights. The map of diet-related deaths in Houston is a grim match for the map of neighborhoods that lack grocery stores.

What can be done? For starters, Houston and Texas can use economic-development grants to steer grocery stores into the neighborhoods that need them most. In Pennsylvania, a public/private partnership called Fresh Food Financing Initiative has helped 88 grocery stores open in underserved neighborhoods; around a half million people now shop in those stores.

A relatively small amount of seed money - $30 million in state economic-development funds, spread over three years - was used to set up a revolving-loan fund. Combined with federal economic-development tax credits already available in low-income areas, those loans were enough to lure supermarket owners into neighborhoods they wouldn't previously have considered. And once open, a higher-than-usual percentage of the stores succeeded; one Philadelphia operator found, to his surprise, that his four new inner-city stores are as profitable as the ones he runs in the suburbs.

Those new stores are great not just for the neighbors' health, but for the neighborhoods' economy too. The stores not only provide jobs, but also serve as anchors for other new development. And ask any real-estate agent: A good grocery store boosts homeowners' property values.

Other cities and states are rapidly copying that Pennsylvania model. Here in Houston and Texas, we should, too. It's a kind of economic development that our neighborhoods are hungry for.